Li'l thespians Chris O'Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn give sweet, unselfconscious performances as Noah and Emma, and the adults do more than just bumble around the fringes, the way grown-ups in kids' movies often do. He's old enough to know how adults usually react to strange or magical things.) (Her brother is a bit more circumspect, at least at first. 'The Last Mimzy' lets the adults catch on fairly soon, and Emma is so delighted to have magic powers that she doesn't even try to hide them. I always get frustrated watching that kind of movie, knowing that the truth will inevitably come out and wishing the grown-ups would quit being so obtuse. It's refreshing that the film doesn't take the usual route of having the kids' ideas and abilities doubted by the adults.

Emma remains sublimely childlike through it all, wanting nothing more than to play with Mimzy, and as her big brother, Noah must evolve from nerd into protector. The kids' parents (Joely Richardson and Timothy Hutton) and Noah's science teacher (Rainn Wilson) are eventually involved, as is the FBI: Evidently you can't use the space toy you found at the beach to inadvertently cause a massive power outage without the feds thinking you're a terrorist. And they know, through the stuffed rabbit (called Mimzy), that someone, somewhere, needs their help with something. Noah doodles patterns on the back of his school work that are identical to ancient Tibetan mystical schematics. Soon Noah and Emma are exhibiting unusual talents. What's more, the toys look and sound different to the kids from the way they appear to everyone else. The box looks alien in design and contains a few odd toys and a stuffed bunny rabbit that can, apparently, talk to Emma.

Moore), this charming, intelligent adventure is about 10-year-old Noah (Chris O'Neil) and his little sister Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn), Seattle kids who find a strange box on the shore while spending Spring Break on a small island off the Washington coast. You want a little more thrill in a regular sci-fi flick, but for kids, this one's OK.īased rather loosely on an old short story by Lewis Padgett (the pen name of husband-and-wife writers Henry Kuttner and C.L. Second, since it's a kids' movie, it's OK that the conflicts are resolved easily and that the young protagonists are never in any serious danger. First, I suspect a lot of it will go over some children's heads. 'The Last Mimzy' is science-fiction for kids, which means a couple things.

The last mimzy movie reviews